“In two weeks I’m starting Whit Stillman‘s new film, called Damsels in Distress,” Greta Gerwig has toldWWD. “I play a girl named Violet who runs a suicide-prevention center at a liberal arts college. She prevents suicides through the powers of 1930s song-and-dance numbers. So it’s a very dark comedy. I’m not really worried about my indie cred. I don’t think there’s any danger of me going, ‘I only do franchises now.'”

I ran my first “return of Whit Stillman” piece on 12.13 09, basing it on a screening of Metropolitan at 92YTribeca.

Fandango is reporting that as of 11 am today, The Social Network ticket sales accounted for only 32% of the total. This doesn’t indicate an opening in the mid to high 20s, which is what I’ve been hearing over the last three or four days, but closer to the low 20s.

“If it was selling 50% to 60% of the total right now, we’d be looking at the mid to high 20s,” an analyst just told me. “But a lot of openings have been mild recently. Wall Street 2 only did $19 million or thereabouts, so I wouldn’t forecast too high a figure for Social Network — I’d pull back a bit.”

I know, I know — how can a movie with this much media hype and a 100% Rotten Tomatoes rating be looking at a weekend tally of this size? Answer: the lowbrow sector is unsure, skeptical, holding back, a little intimidated, not sensing that “olly, olly, in come free” emotional commonality thing. I don’t mean to sound snide, but how else to explain a projection in the low 20s?

In Planet of the Earth terms, The Social Network is a movie about orangutans that was made by orangutans, and which is aimed at an orangutan and chimp audience. What Fandango is telling us is that so far the gorillas haven’t gotten on board.

The Social Network “is simply Hollywood’s way, post-Obama, of sanctioning Harvard’s ‘masters of the universe’ mystique,” he writes. “It’s an attempt at glorifying a contemporary aristocracy-cumplutocracy through flattery of Zuckerberg and his ilk. Like one of those fake-smart, middlebrow TV shows, the speciousness of The Social Network is disguised by topicality. It’s really a movie excusing Hollywood ruthlessness.

“Here’s the truth: Citizen Kane was not about a brat’s betrayal, but about a sensitive braggart’s psychological and philosophical shift inward. The Social Network is more like Hollywood’s classic film industry self-romance The Bad and the Beautiful. Yet that Kane-lite film never excused its bad-boy protagonist’s sins and ended magnanimously by converging his three injured parties’ points of view into one beautifully clarifying narrative. It admitted our cultural compromises; this is TV-trite. In The Social Network, creepiness is heroized.”

I need help in trying to identify the submitted Best Foreign Language hopefuls that have a decent chance of being included on the short list. I know Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu‘s Biutiful has to be on it…c’mon. And that star Javier Bardem (winner of Best Actor prize in Cannes) should be included among the Best Actor hopefuls, and that it ought to qualify for Best Screenplay, Cinematography (Rodrigo Prieto), Musical Score (Gustvao Santaolalla) and Editing (Stephen Mirrione).

After that I’m more or less lost. Adrift. Looking for guidance. Because I really don’t know very much.

Possible frontrunners: Rachid Bouchareb‘s Outside The Law (Algeria), Danis Tanovic‘s Cirkus Columbia (Bosnia and Herzegovina), Susanne Bier‘s In A Better World (Denmark), Xavier Beauvois‘ Of Gods and Men (France), Feo Aldag‘s When We Leave (Germany), Jacek Borcuch‘s All That I Love (Poland), Oliver Schmitz‘ Life Above All (South Africa).

By the time I interviewed Arthur Penn in 1981, during a press junket for Four Friends, he was over. Let’s face it — he had about a 15 year period (’61 to ’76) when he was really crackling. He had a great start doing live TV in the ’50s, and kept his hand in as far as it went after The Missouri Breaks, his last half-decent film. And now he’s passed on.

My favorite Penn film after the classic Bonnie and Clyde is Mickey One — an interesting failure — an arty noir thing — with some brilliant scenes and a offbeat nouvelle vague-ish mood. I love the opening scene in the steam bath with Warren Beatty in the bowler and the laughing fat guys.

Penn stumbled with The Left-Handed Gun (’58), his first Hollywood feature, but then he scored big-time with The Miracle Worker (’62). Mickey One (’65) was an interesting experiment, and The Chase (’66) was a reasonably compelling southern melodrama. Then came his masterpiece (or rather his and Beatty’s masterpiece) Bonnie and Clyde (’67) — one of the greatest films of the 20th Century.

The engaging Alice’s Restaurant (’69) followed, and then Little Big Man (’70), and Night Moves (’75 — “like watching paint dry”) and finally The Missouri Breaks (’76). And then it was over. Not a bad run.

Arthur Penn celebrated his 88th birthday two days ago. He was born on 9.27.22.

Scott Brown‘s Wired piece about The Social Network backstory is catchy and well-written, etc., but the real grabber is the art — i.e., the illustrations by Martin Ansin. (Thanks to Awards Daily‘s Sasha Stone for the tip.)

I was chuckling yesterday about that “Mark Zuckerberg: Creator of Facebook” comic book, but if the illustrations in this Bluewater Productions comic are as good as Ansin’s, (and if the writing was as punchy as it should be), I think I’d buy it.

The idea is for HE readers to come up with overly emphatic 1950s-era tag lines — shock! shame! defiance! never before in Hollywood history! — for present-tense films like Let Me In, The Social Network, Wall Street 2, The Town, Easy A, Case 39, Due Date, Nowhere Boy, It’s Kind of a Funny Story, etc. If you don’t know the shot with these films then please don’t submit. (Original idea inspired by this Film Experience riff about tag lines for 1950s Susan Hayward films.)

“You think Ashley is ‘the one‘, [but] Ashley is kind of like the woman who happened to be on call that night, or that afternoon,” Gibney says. “She’s like a sub who came off the bench, probably because Angela wasn’t available. She happened to be the one who’s on the wiretap. She’s not the one but she’s always played it like she’s the one, always deflecting, ‘it’s a legal issue, I cannot answer’ but always engaging people that she was Spitzer’s girl She was not Spitzer’s girl.

“She’s very interested in advancing her career as a celebrity and as a singer. Fox News and the N.Y. Post are very interested in using that desire for celebrity to use it to advance their agenda, which is to discredit Eliot Spitzer. It’s funny how celebrity gets used. Celebrity is a bizarre form.

“Ashley tried to play me,” Gibney recalls. “We had many email and text conversations with Ashley, and [I] negotiated wth many managers — she went through a lot of them — and we almost had a deal, but then her lawyer insisted on editorial control. I was not wiling to give Ashley Dupre editorial control.”

Two days ago L.A. Times guy Steven Zeitchikreported that Black Swan director Darren Aronofsky has “had discussions” with Superman-reboot producer Chris Nolan, This is a terrible, terrible, terrible idea. If this story (if true) doesn’t represent a diseased equation — i.e., acclaim and success from the making of a brilliant psychological thriller puts you on the short list to direct a bloated franchise flick about a superhero character whose time has totally passed and who means nothing to everyone — I don’t know what does.

“It’s over. The franchise is dead. The press killed it. Your magazine fucking killed it. New York magazine. It’s like all the critics got together and said, ‘This franchise must die.’ Because they all had the exact same review. It’s like they didn’t see the movie.” — Sex and the City costar Chris Nothspeaking several days ago to Vulture‘s “Party Line” reporter.

Well…mission accomplished! All concerned should take a bow. Sometimes life does offer a happy ending. But the critics “didn’t see” Sex and the City 2? Sure thing, Chris.

Warner Home Video’s The Treasure of the Sierra Madre Bluray is the most exquisitely finessed, luscious-looking black-and-white film I’ve seen in high-def since WHV’s Casablanca. The needle-sharp detail and deep velvety blacks are magnificent. There are some dupey portions but nothing to worry about — most of it is pure pleasure. It’s so crisp and alive-looking, so perfectly honed and lighted that you can enjoy it entirely for the visual benefits alone. Which you wouldn’t want to do, of course, but I’m just sayin’.